Very accomplished. George Harvey Bone is an utterly vivid character, drawn with great compassion and tenderness. The way his awful infatuation with Netta ebbs and flows is totally convincing. I don't know whether the portrayal of schizophrenia is accurate, but for the non-afflicted it's certainly plausible. If I had to grouch it would be that Netta is perhaps slightly too monstrous, slightly too much without any redeeming features (other than beauty) to be anything other than a caricature. Oddly, Hangover Square reminded me in setting of the early volumes of Anthony Powell's Dance To the Music of Time, and Netta is perhaps the equivalent of Powell's Pamela Flitton. But Powell is a much more subtle and indirect writer than Hamilton, and, whilst apparently as vile, we leave Flitton knowing much less about her than we do about Hamilton's Netta. As with Powell, this book is also a wonderfully vivid tour around the central London of the pre-war years.

Not a bad book but not one I would immediately recommend to anyone who was either wanting a story set in pre-second World War London or living with some sort of schizophrenic condition as the central character seemed to be afflicted by. The parallels of those who try to hang on to the coat-tails of those with celebrity status still resonate to this day.